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To: kosta50; aruanan; MarkBsnr; stfassisi; Dr. Eckleburg; irishtenor
Likewise, there can be no disobedience without a known command given. There can be no lawlessness where there is no law.

God gave Adam a law and he broke it. Because of that sin was inherited by all men following. The Bible says there was sin in the world before God gave the Law to the Jews, and that all have have sinned. God also tells us that no man has an excuse. So, it doesn't appear that sin works quite as you suggest.

6,006 posted on 06/01/2008 11:53:45 AM PDT by Forest Keeper (It is a joy to me to know that God had my number, before He created numbers.)
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To: Forest Keeper; kosta50; MarkBsnr; stfassisi; Dr. Eckleburg; irishtenor
God gave Adam a law and he broke it. Because of that sin was inherited by all men following.

Actually, that passage says that sin entered the world through one man (Adam) and death through sin and that death came to all men because all men had sinned.

The whole "it's a genetic condition passed down through the male" is a more or less parascriptural gloss. It was taken to an extreme about 30 years ago by the Institute for Creation Research. Henry Morris reasoned 1. since the sin nature was passed along through the father necessitating a virgin birth, 2, since the Lamb of God had to be completely perfect in every way, and 3. since Mary herself, as part of the human race, took part in the corrupted physical nature of fallen flesh and couldn't be the physical antecedent of the perfect physical nature of Jesus any more than Joseph could, the physical, human body of Jesus, therefore, had to be an ex nihilo creation of a human embryo within Mary.

To the expected objection that Jesus wouldn't have been part of the human race in this scheme, Morris basically said that if that's the way God wanted to do it, then it would have been okay because if God considered Jesus to be fully human this way and part of the human race, then he was, and, besides, who are we to question God? As though Morris's fix for an imagined problem was a divine revelation. The same goes for Calvin's postulated "hidden will" of God.
6,008 posted on 06/01/2008 1:20:10 PM PDT by aruanan
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To: Forest Keeper; aruanan; MarkBsnr; stfassisi; Dr. Eckleburg; irishtenor
God gave Adam a law and he broke it

Well, a command or a law is one and the same thing. So, then, why do you disagree with aruanan when he says that God commanded Adam to sin. If Adam was destined to sin by God's design, it was obviously not Adam's choice, but God's. God made sure Adam's choice was as God wished (that Adam sin) and not as Adam wished. In other words, in the Reformed theology, God is the source of sin. If God did not wish any sin, there would be no sin.

Your theory then—that all God has to do is leave us to our depraved nature for us to sin—is not Reformed theory, but Forest Keeper's creation. For, if that is true, then who if not God gave us our "dead" nature? If God is behind everything, then He is behind sin too.

In other words if God didn't predestine us to have sin-loving nature, we would not be desiring sin. No matter how you turn it around, God is the author of that too. Which is what the Orthodox and Catholics on these treads have recognized long time ago about the Reformed, which is that, with this kind of theology of Calvin, the Reformed are on the fringes of Christianity, if not completely outside of it, like the LDS or the JW.

6,016 posted on 06/01/2008 8:50:04 PM PDT by kosta50 (Eastern Orthodoxy is pure Christianity)
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